Stellar Lumens

Introducing users to Stellar

Stellar is a decentralized protocol recognized for transferring and accepting money in any currency. It means that users could, for example, make a transaction from their Euros. And have it completed in Yen, Euros or even bitcoins. Stellar developers expect to support the usual categories for transactions; from payments to a merchant, or remittances back home to rent splits with a roommate. Users can make deposits in any currency to have a balance in their accounts. Stellar also comes with its own built-in digital money, referred to as the stellar (Which is being given away for free by Stellar). The market will determine its value; however, its primary function is providing a conversion path between other currencies.

The stellar

Stellar presents an open-source hosted web client, where the keys are encrypted client-side to their user’s password, so no one but its users has access to their funds. The network has been initialized with a 100 billion stellars supply. Where 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free. And the remaining 5% will be used to fund nonprofit operations.

Stellar’s creators hope to make the currency itself mostly a “behind the scenes” currency and make the Stellar network a helper which provides more liquidity between different currencies. Its price goes around $0.14 and is expected to go $0.6 by 2018.

Gateways

Stellar is built on the concept of gateways. They are entities that let people get into and out of the network. Gateways are similar to local banks, where the users should trust them. Because they do not require to believe the other participants in the system. Also, Users just need to explicitly decide how much they would like to trust a gateway by setting policies.

Credits on the balance are the representation of currencies deposited. If a user puts USD 100 into an appropriate gateway via ACH (Automated Clearing House). The gateway will issue a credit to the user’s Stellar account. This credit will only succeed if the user has already marked them as trusting the gateway for at least USD 100. The credits can also be traded between users without having to involve the gateway.

Consensus

Stellar uses its own distributed ledger with a system that has nothing to do with mining. In this method, the nodes predict they will not collide and then sends the signal to another set of nodes. It does not seem to need to trust the nodes themselves. Each new ledger being decided every few seconds. Appears to be the result of consensus being reached by an iterative process.

Fees for transactions

Each transaction burns 100 stroops. And even though it results in what looks like an uneven balance in a Stellar account. The USD value of 10 stroops was around one two-hundred-thousandths of a penny as of January 2015.